Fun fact: North Korea does in fact maintain an actual Potemkin Village: Kijŏng-dong, located in the DPRK’s half of the Demilitarized Zone. According to intelligence, Kijŏng-dong was built in the 1950s to encourage South Koreans to defect to the North, and is now home to a small number of people whose sole job is to keep the place up.

The DPRK continues to be a strange and wonderful enigma. Heartbreaking and inspiring, terrifying and charming, bizarre and familiar — it is the last bastion of extreme, unapologetic, definitional contradiction left in the world.